Are You a Customer, Employee, or Human Being?

Last night, I used a LinkedIn post to ask this question, asking people to choose only one:

Which of these are you? A customer, employee, or human being?

As expected, the overwhelming majority of people chose "human." I did this exercise to highlight the futility of both "customer engagement" and "employee engagement" programs.

By definition, both are doomed to be a mere shadow of what a better-defined effort could achieve: human engagement.

If you want to engage another human being, why would you define him or her as narrowly as possible?

Let's consider where we are. Here's a picture from Gallup showing employee engagement in the United States during a three-year period when they tracked this metric on a daily basis:

Gallup defines "engaged employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace."

The picture is pretty bleak: roughly two-thirds of employees are NOT engaged.

For many years, I worked in a variety of "customer-focused" activities. Here's a very quick summary of what I learned:

• The companies with the most money to spend on "customer engagement" are least likely to actually make substantive changes in the ways they do business
• "Customer-focused" executives often prefer to measure customer satisfaction—a meaningless metric—rather than customer loyalty, simply because they can report higher scores that way

I'm not sure about you, but never once have I stood at the top of a mountain or had a transcendental moment walking along the ocean and said to myself, "It's so good to be a customer."

Instead, I have thoughts of gratitude for the people around me, for good health, and for the human-to-human moments in my life.

What does human engagement mean?

There are two ways to think about "human engagement", and it's hard to separate one from the other.

Being fully engaged as a human being means being open to—and present for—experiences as they unfold. It means being in touch with who you are and what you want, and it requires being able to listen to and interact with the people around you.

To fully engage with other humans, you must be highly motivated to find and nurture a common space in which you all benefit. If your goal is to take the money and run (i.e. make a sale to a customer), that's not engagement. Neither is pushing an employee to work 24/7 for years, then laying them off when "corporate priorities shift." I've seen the latter happen more times than I can count, and in many cases the company is simultaneously hiring new employees as they fire others.

It's not my desire to create yet another buzzword. You don't have to use my "human engagement" term. No, the purpose of this post is to kill (or gravely wound) two buzzwords that by definition are highly flawed: customer engagement and employee engagement.

Treat people like people.

Be a person, not a corporate robot.

Expect more from the humans around you, regardless of their titles.

And stop putting people in boxes just to satisfy some corporate mandate (or fad) that someday will shift... and cost you your job.

Bruce Kasanoff is a social media ghostwriter for entrepreneurs.